World War 3: Putin is more dangerous than Stalin or Khrushchev

Vladimir Putin is “potentially more dangerous” to the West than an enraged, unstable Stalin in his final months of life or a nuclear-brandishing Khrushchev during the Cuban crisis, according to a leading Russian commentator. Respected political analyst Andrey Piontkovsky gives a deeply alarming view of a lurch towards a new world war.

Putin, 66 yesterday, has shown himself ready to use military force – for example in Crimea and eastern Ukraine – and in future this can include atomic weapons, he predicted.

The Kremlin leader has the “ability” in a single step “to confront the West with an unthinkable choice between humiliating capitulation or hybrid nuclear war”, said Piontkovsky, a top applied mathematician and former director of the Strategic Studies Centre in Moscow.

Putin’s blunt message for the West - he claimed - is: “I aim to win a hybrid war and make you kneel, despite me being weaker than you in everything.

“Because, unlike you, I have a decisive advantage.

Vladimir Putin has been described as more dangerous than Stalin and Khrushchev (Image: Getty)

"When attacking you I am ready to use a nuclear weapon, and when defending yourself, you are not.

“This is why you’ll retreat and capitulate.”

The problem for Western leaders is that Putin “lives in an alternative reality” and does not think the way they do, said Piontkovsky, a longtime critic of the Russian ruler.

Calling Russia a “kleptocracy”, and Putin a “smotryashchiy” - or thieves’ boss in Soviet jail-speak - he claimed the Kremlin supremo “has turned out to be potentially more dangerous than the Stalin of winter 1952, or the Khrushchev of Autumn 1962”.

At the time the manic Stalin was close to death and seeing enemies everywhere, while a decade later Khrushchev was embroiled with America in the near-catastrophic Cuban missile crisis.

“The post-Soviet political construction turned out to be more primitive than the Communist,” he said.

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“It doesn’t have an insurance against inadequate behaviour by the top person.

“There is no Politburo which was able to catch Khrushchev’s hand at critical moment, or grab Comrade Stalin by his throat.”

He warned: “Putin is also dangerous because despite his boasting, his hybrid crusade of the ‘Russian World’ against the West is based on the deepest inferiority complex - and on an understanding that Russia cannot compete with the West in anything substantial, including in the military sphere.”

Recalling a tsarist era description of Russia, Piontkovsky said: “The Russian World is an icy desert where a dangerous person walks about - this time not with an axe but a nuclear bomb.”

Claiming the planet had come through the Third - Cold - World War, he claimed Putin was bent on an “agenda” for a Fourth World War.

This did not involve the “destruction of the hated USA as its main goal”.

Some Russians still miss Stalin (Image: Getty)

“This agenda is a lot less ambitious - a maximum expansion of the ‘Russian World’, breakup of Nato, and discrediting of the US as the guarantor of Western security.

"Overall, this is revenge for the USSR’s loss in the Third (Cold) World War, just as World War Two was the Germans’ revenge bid for defeat in the First World War”.

Piontkovsky - now living in exile - claimed US defence secretary Jim ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis was one of the few Western leaders who understood the Putin threat.

“Perhaps Mattis is the first Western state official who heard the message …and didn’t ignore it,” he wrote for Radio Svodboda.

The Kremlin is “a real threat” to the US and the “whole world”, he said.

He forecast Putin will ‘test” Nato’s resolve.

Nikita Khrushchev was not as dangerous as Putin (Image: AFP/Getty)

"In October 1962 John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev recoiled from the edge of an abyss on a very last moment, because they both realised that there is no rational definition of ‘victory’ in their nuclear collision.

"After more than half a century a man has appeared who has his very own definition of victory in nuclear war.”